Social media has become an important way for online users to connect with each other, create content, and exchange information. As social media sites such as Facebook®, Twitter®, LinkedIn®, etc. become more popular, many companies are becoming interested in leveraging social media information for business purposes. For example, Hearsay Social™ provides an enterprise social media platform that aggregates content generated on various social media sites and uses the content for sales and marketing purposes.
A large amount of data is constantly generated on social media sites and is ever-changing. New content can be added, existing content can be modified, and old content can be removed. The aggregated content should accurately reflect the additions, modifications, and deletions of content. Given the large amount of data that is constantly generated on the social media sites, however, verification of the aggregated content has become a challenging task. It can be expensive to implement and maintain special software designed for the purpose of data verification. Further, any defects in the software logic can still lead to incorrect results.